Rome, and Academies at Aries, Soissons, Nimes, and many other towns, and he reorganized the Academy of Painting and Sculpture which llichelieu had established. He was a member of the French Academy ; and one very characteristic rule, recorded to have been proposed by him with the intention of expediting the great Dictionary, in which he was much interested, was that no one should be accounted present at any meeting unless he arrived before the hour of commencement and remained till the hour for leaving. In 1673 he presided over the first exhibition of the works of living painters; and he enriched the Louvre with hundreds of pictures and statues. He gave many pensions to men of letters, among whom we find Moliere, Corneille, Eacine, Boileau, Huet, and Varillas, and even foreigners, as Huyghens, Vossius the geographer, Carlo Dati the Dellacruscan, and Heinsius the great .Dutch scholar. There is evidence to show that by this munificence he hoped to draw out praises of his sovereign and himself ; but this motive certainly is far from accounting for all the splendid, if in some cases specious, services that he rendered
to literature, science, and art.Indeed to everything that concerned the interests of France Colbert devoted unsparing thought and toil. Be sides all that has been mentioned, he found time to do something for the better administration of justice (the codification of ordinances, the diminishing of the number of judges, the reduction of the expense and length of trials), for the establishment of a superior system of police, and even for the improvement of the breed of horses and the increase of cattle. As superintendent of public buildings he enriched Paris with boulevards, quays, and triumphal arches ; he relaid the foundation-stone of the Louvre, and brought Bernin from Rome to be its architect ; and he erected its splendid colonnade upon the plan of Claude Perrault, by whom Bernin had been replaced. He was not permitted, however, to complete the work, being compelled to yield to the king s preference for residences outside Paris, and to devote himself to Marly and Versailles.
Amid all these public labours his private fortune was never neglected. While he was reforming the finances of the nation, and organizing its navy, he always found time to direct the management of his smallest farm. He died a millionaire, and left fine estates all over France. For his eldest son, who was created Marquis de Seignelay, he obtained the reversion of the office of minister of marine ; his second son became archbishop of Rouen ; and a third son, the Marquis d Ormoy, became superintendent of buildings.
In estimating the value of Colbert s ministry, two distinct questions must be considered What its results would have been in the absence of counteracting influences, over which he had no control, and what they actually were. To the first it may be answered that France, peace ful, enriched by a wide-spread commerce, and freed from the weight of taxes, alikeheavy and intrinsically mischievous, would probably have developed powers that would have enabled her to throw aside what was harmful in his policy, and possibly to attain liberty without the frenzied struggle of the Revolution. To the second question a very different reply must be given. What the great " ministre de la paix" built up was torn down, even as he built it, to erect the unholy fabric of his master s military glory. The war department was in the hands of Colbert s great rival, Luvois; and to every appeal for peace Louis was deaf. He was deaf also to all the appeals against the other forms of his boundless extravagance which Colbert, with all his deference towards his sovereign, bravely ventured to make.[1] Thus it came about that, only a few years after he had commenced to free the country from the weight of the loans and taxes which crushed her to the dust, Colberb was forced to heap upon her a new load of loans and taxes more heavy than the last. Henceforth his life was a hopeless struggle, and the financial and fiscal reform which, with the great exception of the establishment of the navy, was the most valuable service to France contemplated by him. came to nought.
Depressed by his failure, deeply wounded by the king s favour for Luvois, and worn out by overwork, Colbert s strength gave way at a comparatively early age. In 1680 he was the constant victim of severe fevers, from which he recovered for a time through the use of quinine prescribed by an English physician. But in 1683, at the age of sixty-four, he was seized with a fatal illness, and on the 6th of September he expired. It was said that he died of a broken heart, and a conversation with the king is reported in which Louis disparagingly compared the buildings of Versailles, which Colbert was superintend ing, with the works constructed by Luvois in Flanders. He took to bed, k it is true, immediately afterwards, refusing to receive all messages from the king ; but his constitution was utterly broken before, and a post-mortem examination proved that he had been suffering from stone. His body was interred in the secrecy of night, for fear of outrage from the Parisians, by whom his name was cordially de tested.
Colbert was a great statesman, who did much for France, and would have done vastly more had it been possible. Yet his insight into political science was not deeper than that of his age ; nor did he possess that superiority in moral qualities which would have inspired him to bring in a reign of purity and righteousness. His rule was a very bad example of over-government. In popular liberty he did not believe ; the parliaments and the States-General received no support from him. The technicalities of justice he never allowed to interfere with his plans ; justice herself he sometimes commanded to stay her course, and beware of crushing any friend of his who happened to lie in her way. He trafficked in public offices for the profit of Mazarin and in his own behalf. He caused the suffering of thousands in the galleys ; he had no ear, it is said, for the cry of the suppliant. There was indeed a more human side to his character, as is shown in his letters, full of wise advice and affectionate care, to his children, his brothers, his cousins even. Yet to all outside he was "the man of marble." To diplomacy he never pretended; persuasion and deceit were not the weapons he employed ; all his work was carried out by the iron hand of authority. He was a great states man in that he conceived a magnificent yet practicable scheme for making France first among nations, and in that he possessed a matchless faculty for work, neither shrink ing from the vastest undertakings nor scorning the most trivial details.
Numerous vies and doges of Colbert have been published ; but the most thorough student of his life and administration was Pierre Clement, member of the Institute, who in 1846 published his Vie de Colbert, and in 1861 the first of the 9 vols. of the Lettre.s, instruc tions, et memoircs de Colbert. The historical introductions prefixed to each of these volumes have been published by Mme. Clwnent under the title of the Histoire de Colbert et de son administration (187 i). Among Colbert s papers are Memoires sur hs affaires de finance de France (written about 1663), a fragment entitled Particu- larites secretes de la vie du Roy, and other accounts of the earlier part of the reign of Louis XIV.
mentary borough, and river-port of England, in the county of Essex, 51 miles from London by the Great Eastern Railway, on the Colne, which is there crossed by three
bridges. The town within the walls forms an oblong of
- ↑ See especially a vn.em.oire presented to the king in 1666, puolished in the; Lettres, etc., de Colbert, vol. ii.
